Tag Archives: Gender

The NY Times had a piece about the Olympics in Beijing having a testing lab to see which “suspect women” are “actually” women.

What?

The Olympics has a long history of these sorts of tests, nudity tests and chromosomal tests. Which were useful for revealing which women were men– which has never happened (the only man to have ever entered as a woman revealed himself 20 years after he came in 4th place for the women’s high jump– some advantage, huh). Instead it revealed which women, according to the NY Times, were born with defects, meaning not XX chromosomes.

This gender binary shit is getting a little old, and in fact one plastic surgeon interviewed said:

“It’s very difficult to define what is a man and what is a woman at this point,” said Christine McGinn, a plastic surgeon who specializes in transgender medicine.

Because of a range of genetic conditions, people who look like women may have a Y chromosome, while people who look like men may not, she said. Many times, the people do not learn of the defects until they reach adulthood. “It gets really complicated very quickly,” McGinn said.

No duh. Why this isn’t taken as evidence of the ridiculousness of a binary sex/gender system is beyond me.

Also, It can only be sexist thinking would assume a male athlete is automatically given an advantage because he has a penis.

So I began thinking the other day about the bizarre relationship between food and gender (and of course sexuality). It is pretty well known that meat is associated with masculinity (perhaps lending to the higher rate of certain health issues in men?). If you want examples: hereherehereherehere. Men eat more meat than women traditionally, etc etc. However, I came to thinking– how is my masculinity affected. After all black men are hypermasculinized in the public discourse… so do I come out not as demasculinized? How masculine, in the public eye, is a Black male vegan compared to a White male vegan, or an Asian male vegan, or a Latino vegan, or so on and so on.